Yeah, any discussion of anonymity and Signal can start and end with phone numbers. They could maybe offer an option to use just a username and some kind of authentication? But somehow they don’t :(

Worse, they store your phone number (along with your name, your photo, and most damning of all, a list of all of your signal contacts) permanently in the cloud. This is exactly the information they used to brag about not being able to turn over to the authorities because they didn't collect it in the first place. Their website still has pages that brag about that with no indication that it's no longer the truth.

I've seen way too many signal users who had no idea this data collection was even happening which is a good sign that Signal isn't very trustworthy. If you're going to promote yourself to whistleblowers and activists, they need to know what data you're collecting and what their risks are, but ever since Signal started collecting all this data they've refused to update their privacy policy which even now starts with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." which is an outright lie. I'm pretty sure at this point it's a dead canary warning people not to trust the service. They've been very unclear in their communications about the data collection too.

They've removed features people loved (the ability to get secure communications and unsecured SMS/MMS in a single app) and they've pushed weird crypto features nobody asked for, which might be another sign they're trying to encourage users to leave the platform, but I sure see them come up a lot in the news. Signal seems to get a lot of promotion. At this point though, people looking for secure communication might want to look for something else.

For more info see:

https://community.signalusers.org/t/proper-secure-value-secu...

https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-...

https://old.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/htmzrr/psa_disablin...

I've been hearing that that feature will be added soon since 2014.

That has always bugged me about Signal. It seems like such an obvious hole--one that other services like Telegram and Wickr don't suffer from.

I think Signal implies that you always know and are comfortable with the person on the other side of the message, but that is not always the case.

Whenever this is mentioned, the answer is always the ease of adoption. Less tech literate people can just use their phone number and they won't have to bother themselves with anything else.

Perhaps it doesn't have to be mentioned in every article, even though people feel it needs to be mentioned in every HN discussion.

No mention in your criticism above that bringing genuine e2e encryption to the masses in a way that is actually used by billions of people had not been achieved and many thought was totally impossible until Moxie went and did it.

Once you acknowledge that incredible achievement that nobody else got close to previously, you can then criticise anything you think could have been done better. Or could be improved in the future.

I know when I do it I'm doing something similar to criticising Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's execution of his skyhook and that is a reasonable thing to acknowledge, even when I'm 100% sure that my criticism is legitimate.